out of the way, and about half a mile on we come across a burned-out, rusted car, tipped halfway into a field. The front wheels and bonnet are missing and its boot gapes open. Nettles stretch up through the engine.
Gradually we leave the tussocky fields behind. The hills on either side of the way begin to climb towards the sky. As they rise into slanting mounds and suave, tilting cones they assume new distinction and character; they acquire the presence, even sentience, of sculpture or of people standing peripherally and very still, alone or in deliberate clusters. Light brims over the shoulders of the eclipsed hills to the east and pours itself over the opposite side in cold, showy pinks and yellows. The track rises ahead and then dips, and in the distance disappears round a curve into the dark swell of a valley. I glance at Arthur. His eyes are running with tears and his mouth opens and closes wetly.
Nearly there, I whisper, and he nods.
After another mile or so the wide pebbly stream that is now running alongside the track veers away extravagantly. We round the next curve and Arthur cries out. I stop the car on the edge of an apron of pitted tarmac tatty with weeds and the mangled remains of benches and litter bins. The building before us is a small redbrick mansion with a miscellany of dark elaborate turrets and impractical chimneys and gabled windows, set into the hillside in front of a sparse plantation of twiggy shrubs and trees. Even derelict and vandalized, it looks pompous.
The whole place is surrounded by high chain-link fencing, bearing warning signs about trespass and the hazardous state of “these premises.” I leave Arthur weeping quietly in the car and walk the fence. I go as far as the ruin of a modern single-storey extension, not visible from the car, that abuts on the far side of the lodge. Here is where two sections of fencing have been forced apart and where, against the walls of the extension, fires have been set. Smoke stains snake up the boards nailed over the front doors as far as the asphalt overhang of the flat roof. The blistered, prefabricated panels under one of the windows have sheered off and now curl outward. Like all the others, this window had been boarded up, but now it’s a jagged dark rectangle. Traces of another fire on the ground underneath it reach as high as the sill. The window board itself, prised off and split and partly burnt, lies nearby in a bed of broken glass.
I’m stepping through the gap in the fence, twisting my way through a web of cut and buckled wire, when I hear excited screams from Arthur.
Ruth, Ruth! Quick! They’re still here!
I run back round to the car, but it’s empty. He shouts again. He’s way over by the front porch of the lodge, waving at me. I follow his gestures and he guides me along the fence to where it curves up the other side and around to the back. It’s adjoined clumsily to a wind-stricken tree whose trunk lists towards the ground, leaving an easy gap. Arthur beckons me through and I hurry down to him. The original pillared porch juts out squarely from the double front doors. There may have been benches set into the sides of the porch once, but they’re long gone. Some of the coloured diamond floor tiles are still in place under drifts of leaves and rubbish, and the walls are ornamented from top to bottom with panels of glazed brick set between carved pilasters and small empty niches. High on the walls a bas-relief frieze of acanthus and birds, bordered by a pair of deep ledges decorated like cake icing, runs along all three sides. Arthur is holding up a set of keys.
You remember? The secret spares! The porch ledge! Bill what’s his-name got them made in Matlock, remember? We’ll soon be in business, he says, thumbing through the keys and selecting one far bigger than the others. Aha, here’s the mortise. Proper locksmith’s key, that. Feel the weight of it.
He hasn’t noticed, or maybe he just doesn’t see, that the front doors are now secured top, bottom, and middle by three hinged metal bands whose hasps are chained and padlocked.
Come on, I say. I think there’s a way in round the back.
It’s difficult, though. The broken window of the extension is impossibly high for Arthur and it takes time and a lot of strength for me to haul the vandalized benches and litter bins round to the break in the fence, get them through, and fix them under the sill so that he can climb up and step over.
We find ourselves in a bare classroom. It must always have been warped and thin and damp, but it now looks as if water has flooded through it. Mould stains streak the walls and the ceiling is buckled and slack. White deposits of mineral salts encrust the crumbling cladding material. The floor is gritty with it, and also with bird droppings and cigarette ends and burnt rubbish. There’s a trapped, soaked stench of rain and ash and urine.
Through the door and across a corridor is another room, identical except that there’s a heap of rags and bottles in one corner and it’s darker because the window boards are still in place. The sun is bleeding through the gaps, casting wavering needles of light onto the far wall that’s covered by a painted, chipped relief map studded with arrows and circles and crosses. Arthur gazes at it, enraptured. He wanders across with a hand outstretched and stabs at a point between some brown ridges and an irregular dark blue oval.
He strokes a fingertip across it and then touches his finger to his lips.
Here. Just here, he says, replacing the finger with tender and tremulous precision back on the exact spot on the map. Here, Ruth.
Then he moves into a shaft of light that illuminates his face abruptly and dazzles him so that he has to squeeze his eyes shut, and he loses his balance and begins to stagger. His eyes fly open in fright. I rush to take hold of him before he falls, and our bodies fold together. He shakes in my arms. I watch the light tremble on the floor and across the walls. Then I take his hand and lead him out and along to the end of the corridor where there’s a solid old door connecting the extension to the main house. Arthur produces the keys again, and finally we find the one that fits. Beyond that is a kind of long scullery and another locked door, but it turns out we have the key to that, too.
He meanders through the house, raising dust. All the rooms are bare and dark and seem to me even more abjectly and irretrievably abandoned than the classrooms; their emptiness is sadder and deeper in a way I can’t explain. But for Arthur it is pure reunion, unalloyed by melancholy. Behind every heavy, squealing door is something, or someone, he is delighted to see. In a room with a wide bay window he tries to draw my attention to the fireplace.
Remember! he says. Remember? We thought it so old-fashioned, that old marbled ebony, the maroon tiles! Worth a fortune today, old painted tiles like that.
He gazes at the wall admiringly as if the fireplace, rather than the raw gap where it used to be, were actually here. He takes me into the stripped-out kitchen that still holds a brackish vegetal smell, and from here into what he calls the eating and recreation quarters, now blank and damp. On the linoleum floor there are black streaks and dented circles where rubber-tipped chair and table legs were set down and scraped back in the clamour of innumerable institutional meals. Arthur stoops forward as if to catch again the trooping of children’s feet from serving hatch to table, the crash of plates and dishes, the clang of dropped cutlery. A dartboard still hangs on the wall.
As we go on he grows spry, pointing out this feature and that: the deep cornicing and skirting boards, and in the stairwell, where now hangs only a length of tied-off electrical cord, the original Edwardian brass electric candelabra with the little parchment shades. He leads me upstairs and first we inspect the teachers’ accommodation on the floor between the girls’ and boys’ dormitories. He remembers the room I slept in but not the name of the red-haired phys. ed. teacher I had to share with. I don’t, either.
Then we look over the top floor and the first floor, each one with five or six featureless rooms where, he reminds me, the kids bunked up in sixes and eights. He shows me their bathrooms with lines of collapsed shower stalls and basins clogged with dead insects. His fatigue has lifted; he walks the whole house, open-mouthed. I follow, answering his excitement with a quieter pleasure.
I’m assessing each room, thinking about practicalities. Most are completely empty but here and there I note the hulks of furniture that must have been too heavy or too worthless to move. On one landing stands a grey metal cupboard without doors that still has pillows and some cardboard boxes of cleaning fluid and toilet paper in it. Nearby, three or four narrow bed frames with broken slats are upended against the wall.
It’s broad daylight now. I drive the car round to the hole in the fence and we unload, Arthur fairly trotting up and down with the lighter things. I’ve settled on the darkest room to sleep in, a small one with a boarded window on the middle floor at the back that lies in the shadow of the hillside. It’s probably going to get very cold; there’s a little fireplace but I’m too tired to think now about whether or not the chimney might still work. I’m also too tired to drag in a bed frame. I fetch some of the pillows and put them on the floor and cover them with the thickest of our
